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War Reprint, No. 6 



A Selection from 



President Wilson's War Addresses 



1917-1918 



PHILADELPHIA 

McKINLEY PUBLISHING COMPANY 
1918 

Price, 20 cents 



-t^P* 



LA 



WAR REPRINTS. NO. 6. 



CONTENTS 



Address to Senate Upon Terms of Peace in Europe, 

January 22, 1917 - - - - - - 3 

Address to Congress Upon Germany's Renewal of Submarine 

War Against Merchant Ships, February 3, 191 7 - 5 

Address to Congress Advising that War Be Declared Against 

Germany, April 2, 1917 - 7 

Proclamation Calling Upon All to Speak, Act, and Serve 

Together, April 16, 1917 - - - - - 10 

Flag Day Address, June 14, 1917 - - - - 12 

Address to Congress Upon War Aims and Peace Terms, 

January 8, 1918 ______ 14. 

Address to Congress Upon German and Austrian Peace 

Utterances, February 11, 1918 - - - 16 

Address Delivered at Opening of the Third Liberty Loan 

Campaign, April 6, 1918 - - - - - 19 






PRESIDENT WILSONS WAR MESSAGES. 



A Selection from President Wilson's Addresses 



Address to the Senate, Upon Terms of Peace in 
Europe, January 22, 1917. 

Gentlemen of the Senate: 

On the eighteenth of December last I addressed 
an identic note to the governments of the nations now 
at war requesting them to state, more definitely than 
(»j they had yet been stated by either group of bel- 
ligerents, the terms upon which they would deem it 
possible to make peace. I spoke on behalf of hu- 
manity and of the rights of all neutral nations like 
our own, many of whose most vital interests the war 
puts in constant jeopardy. The Central Powers 
united in a reply which stated merely that they were 
ready to meet their antagonists in conference to dis- 
cuss terms of peace. The Entente Powers have re- 
plied much more definitely and have stated, in gen- 
eral terms, indeed, but with sufficient definiteness to 
imply details, the arrangements, guarantees, and acts 
of reparation which they deem to be the indispen- 
sable conditions of a satisfactory settlement. We 
are that much nearer a definite discussion of the 
peace which shall end the present war. We are that 
much nearer the discussion of the international con- 
cert which must thereafter hold the world at peace. 
In every discussion of the peace that must end this 
war it is taken for granted that that peace must be 
followed by some definite concert of power which will 
make it virtually impossible that any such catastro- 
phe should ever overwhelm us again. Every lover of 
mankind, every sane and thoughtful man must take 
that for granted. 

I have sought this opportunity to address you be- 
cause I thought that I owed it to you, as the council 
associated with me in the final determination of our 
international obligations, to disclose to you without 
reserve the thought and purpose that have been tak- 
ing form in my mind in regard to the duty of our 
Government in the days to come when it will be 
necessary to lay afresh and upon a new plan the 
foundations of peace among the nations. 

It is inconceivable that the people of the United 
States should play no part in that great enterprise. 
To take part in such a service will be the opportu- 
nity for which they have sought to prepare them- 
selves by the very principles and purposes of their 
polity and the approved practices of their Govern- 
ment ever since the days when they set up a new 
nation in the high and honorable hope that it might 
in all that it was and did show mankind the way to 
liberty. They cannot in honor withhold the service 
to which they are now about to be challenged. They 
do not wish to withhold it. But they owe it to them- 
selves and to the other nations of the world to state 
the conditions under which they will feel free to ren- 
der it. 



That service is nothing less than this, to add their 
authority and their power to the authority and force 
of other nations to guarantee peace and justice 
throughout the world. Such a settlement cannot now 
be long postponed. It is right that before it comes 
this Government should frankly formulate the condi- 
tions upon which it would feel justified in asking our 
people to approve its formal and solemn adherence 
to a League for Peace. I am here to attempt to state 
those conditions. 

The present war must first be ended ; but we owe 
it to candor and to a just regard for the opinion of 
mankind to say that, so far as our participation in 
guarantees of future peace is concerned, it makes a 
great deal of difference in what way and upon what 
terms it is ended. The treaties and agreements 
which bring it to an end must embody terms which 
will create a peace that is worth guaranteeing and 
preserving, a peace that will win the approval of 
mankind, not merely a peace that will serve the sev- 
eral interests and immediate aims of the nations en- 
gaged. We shall have no voice in determining what 
those terms shall be, but we shall, I feel sure, have 
a voice in determining whether they shall be made 
lasting or not by the guarantees of a universal cove- 
nant, and our judgment upon what is fundamental 
and essential as a condition precedent to permanency 
should be spoken now, not afterwards when it may be 
too late. 

No covenant of co-operative peace that does not 
include the peoples of the New World can suffice to 
keep the future safe against war ; and yet there is 
only one sort of peace that the peoples of America 
could join in guaranteeing. The elements of that 
peace must be elements that engage the confidence 
and satisfy the principles of the American govern- 
ments, elements consistent with their political faith 
and with the practical convictions which the peoples 
of America have once for all embraced and under- 
taken to defend. 

I do not mean to say that any American govern- 
ment would throw any obstacle in the way of any 
terms of peace the governments now at war might 
agree upon, or seek to upset them when made, what- 
ever they might be. I only take it for granted that 
mere terms of peace between the belligerents will 
not satisfy even the belligerents themselves. Mere 
agreements may not make peace secure. It will be 
absolutely necessary that a force be created as a 
guarantor of the permanency of the settlement so 
much greater than the force of any nation now en- 
gaged or any alliance hitherto formed or projected 
that no nation, no probable combination of nations 
could face or withstand it. If the peace presently to 
be made is to endure, it must be a peace made secure 
by the organized major force of mankind. 



WAR REPRINTS, NO. 6. 



The terms of the immediate peace agreed upon will 
determine whether it is a peace for which such a 
guarantee can be secured. The question upon which 
the whole future peace and policy of the world de- 
pends is this : Is the present war a struggle for a 
just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of 
power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance 
of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, 
the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only 
a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There 
must be, not a balance of power, but a community 
of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized 
common peace. 

Fortunately we have received very explicit assur- 
ances on this point. The statesmen of both of the 
groups of nations now arrayed against one another 
have said, in terms that could not be misinterpreted, 
that it was no part of the purpose they had in mind 
to crush their antagonists. But the implications of 
these assurances may not be equally clear to all — 
may not be the same on both sides of the water. I 
think it will be serviceable if I attempt to set forth 
what we understand them to be. 

They imply, first of all, that it must be a peace 
without victory. It is not pleasant to say this. I 
beg that I may be permitted to put my own inter- 
pretation upon it and that it may be understood that 
no other interpretation was in my thought. I am 
seeking only to face realities and to face them with- 
out soft concealments. Victory would mean peace 
forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon 
the vanquished. It would be accepted in humilia- 
tion, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and 
would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory 
upon which terms of peace would rest, not per- 
manently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a 
peace between equals can last. Only a peace the 
very principle of which is equality and a common 
participation in a common benefit. The right state 
of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as 
necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settle- 
ment of vexed questions of territory or of racial and 
national allegiance. 

The equality of nations upon which peace must be 
founded if it is to last must be an equality of rights ; 
the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor 
imply a difference between big nations and small, 
between those that are powerful and those that are 
weak. Right must be based upon the common 
strength, not upon the individual strength, of the 
nations upon whose concert peace will depend. 
Equality of territory or of resources there of course 
cannot be ; nor any other sort of equality not gained 
in the ordinary peaceful and legitimate development 
of the peoples themselves. But no one asks or ex- 
pects anything more than an equality of rights. Man- 
kind is looking now for freedom of life, not for 
equipoises of power. 

And there is a deeper thing involved than even 
equality of right among organized nations. No 
peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recog- 



nize and accept the principle that governments de- 
rive all their just powers from the consent of the 
governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand 
peoples about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if 
they were property. I take it for granted, for in- 
stance, if I may venture upon a single example, that 
statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be 
a united, independent, and autonomous Poland, and 
that henceforth inviolable security of life, of wor- 
ship, and of industrial and social development should 
be guaranteed to all peoples who have lived hitherto 
under the power of governments devoted to a faith 
and purpose hostile to their own. 

I speak of this, not because of any desire to exalt 
and abstract political principle which has always been 
held very dear by those who have sought to build up 
liberty in America, but for the same reason that I 
have spoken of the other conditions of peace which 
seem to me clearly indispensable — because I wish 
frankly to uncover realities. Any peace which does 
not recognize and accept this principle will inevitably 
be upset. It will not rest upon the affections or the 
convictions of mankind. The ferment of spirit of 
whole populations will fight subtly and constantly 
against it, and all the world will sympathize. The 
world can be at peace only if its life is stable, and 
there can be no stability where the will is in rebel- 
lion, where there is not tranquillity of spirit and a 
sense of justice, of freedom, and of right. 

So far as practicable, moreover, every great people 
now struggling towards a full development of its re- 
sources and of its powers should be assured a direct 
outlet to the great highways of the sea. Where this 
cannot be done by the cession of territory, it can no 
doubt be done by the neutralization of direct rights 
of way under the general guarantee which will as- 
sure the peace itself. With a right comity of ar- 
rangement no nation need be shut away from free 
access to the open paths of the world's commerce. 

And the paths of the sea must alike in law and in 
fact be free. The freedom of the seas is the sine qua 
non of peace, equality, and co-operation. No doubt 
a somewhat radical reconsideration of many of the 
rules of international practice hitherto thought to be 
established may be necessary in order to make the 
seas indeed free and common in practically all cir- 
cumstances for the use of mankind, but the motive 
for such changes is convincing and compelling. 
There can be no trust or intimacy between the peo- 
ples of the world without them. The free, constant, 
uuthreatened intercourse of nations is an essential 
part of the process of peace and of development. It 
need not be difficult either to define or to secure the 
freedom of the seas if the governments of the world 
sincerely desire to come to an agreement concern- 
ing it. 

It is a problem closely connected with the limita- 
tion of naval armaments and the co-operation of the 
navies of the world in keeping the seas at once free 
and safe. And the question of limiting naval arma- 
ments opens the wider and perhaps more difficult 



PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 



question of the limitation of armies and of all pro- 
grams of military preparation. Difficult and deli- 
cate as these questions are, they must be faced with 
the utmost candor and decided in a spirit of real 
accommodation if peace is to come with healing in its 
wings, and come to stay. Peace cannot be had with- 
out concession and sacrifice. There can be no sense 
of safety and equality among the nations if great 
preponderating armaments are henceforth to con- 
tinue here and there to be built up and maintained. 
The statesmen of the world must plan for peace and 
nations must adjust and accommodate their policy to 
it as they have planned for war and made ready for 
pitiless contest and rivalry. The question of arma- 
ments, whether on land or sea, is the most imme- 
diately and intensely practical question connected 
with the future fortunes of nations and of mankind. 

I have spoken upon these great matters without re- 
serve and with the utmost explicitness because it has 
seemed to me to be necessary if the world's yearning 
desire for peace was anywhere to find free voice and 
utterance. Perhaps I am the only person in high au- 
thority amongst all the peoples of the world who is 
at liberty to speak and hold nothing back. I am 
speaking as an individual, and yet I am speaking 
also, of course, as the responsible head of a great 
government, and I feel confident that I have said 
what the people of the United States would wish me 
to say. May I not add that I hope and believe that 
I am in effect speaking for liberals and friends of 
humanity in every nation and of every program of 
liberty? I would fain believe that I am speaking 
for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have 
as yet had no place or opportunity to speak their 
real hearts out concerning the death and ruin they 
see to have come already upon the persons and the 
homes they hold most dear. 

And in holding out the expectation that the peo- 
ple and Government of the United States will join 
the other civilized nations of the world in guarantee- 
ing the permanence of peace upon such terms as I 
have named I speak with the greater boldness and 
confidence because it is clear to every man who can 
think that there is in this promise no breach in either 
our traditions or our policy as a nation, but a fulfil- 
ment, rather, of all that we have professed or striven 
for. 

I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should 
with one accord adopt the doctrine of President 
Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation 
should seek to extend its polity over any other na- 
tion or people, but that every people should be left 
free to determine its own polity, its own way of de- 
velopment, unhindered, urithreatened, unafraid, the 
little along with the great and powerful. 

I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid 
entangling alliances which would draw them into 
competitions of power: catch them in a net of in- 
trigue and selfish rivalry, and disturb their own 
affairs with influences intruded from without. There 
is no entangling alliance in a concert of power. When 



all unite to act in the same sense and with the same 
purpose all act in the common interest and are free 
to live their own lives under a common protection. 

I am proposing government by the consent of the 
governed; that freedom of the seas which in inter- 
national conference after conference representatives 
of the United States have urged with the eloquence 
of those who are the convinced disciples of liberty; 
and that moderation of armaments which makes of 
armies and navies a power for order merely, not an 
instrument of aggression or of selfish violence. 

These are American principles, American policies. 
We could stand for no others. And they are also the 
principles and policies of forward looking men and 
women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every 
enlightened community. They are the principles of 
mankind and must prevail. 

Address to Congress Upon Germany's Renewal of 

Submarine War Against Merchant Ships 

February 3, 1917. 

Gentlemen of the Congress: 

The Imperial German Government on the thirty- 
first of January announced to this Government and 
to the governments of the other neutral nations that 
en and after the first day of February, the present 
month, it would adopt a policy with regard to the use 
of submarines against all shipping seeking to pass 
through certain designated areas of the high seas to 
which it is clearly my duty to call your attention. 

Let me remind the Congress that on the eighteenth 
of April last, in view of the sinking on the twenty- 
fourth of March of the cross-channel passenger 
steamer Sussex by a German submarine, without sum- 
mons or warning, and the consequent loss of the lives 
of several citizens of the United States who were pas- 
sengers aboard her, this Government addressed a note 
to the Imperial German Government in which it made 
the following declaration: 

If it is still the purpose of the Imperial Government to 
prosecute relentless and indiscriminate warfare against ves- 
sels of commerce by the use of submarines without regard 
to what the Government of the United States must consider 
the sacred and indisputable rules of international law and 
the universally recognized dictates of humanity, the Gov- 
ernment of the United States is at last forced to the con- 
clusion that there is but one course it can pursue. Unless 
the Imperial Government should now immediately declare 
and effect an abandonment of its present methods of sub- 
marine warfare against passenger and freight-carrying ves- 
sels, the Government of the United States can have no 
choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the German 
Empire altogether. 

In reply to this declaration the Imperial German 
Government gave this Government the following as- 
surance: 

The German Government is prepared to do its utmost to 
confine the operations of war for the rest of its duration 
to the fighting forces of the belligerents, thereby also in- 
suring the freedom of the seas, a principle upon which the 
German Government believes, now as before, to be in agree- 
ment with the Government of the United States. 



WAR REPRINTS, NO. 6. 



The German Government, guided by this idea, notifies the 
Government of the United States that the German naval 
forces have received the following orders: In accordance 
with the general principles of visit and search and destruc- 
tion of merchant vessels recognized by international law, 
such vessels, both within and without the area declared as 
naval war zone, shall not be sunk without warning and 
without saving human lives, unless these ships attempt to 
escape or offer resistance. 

" But," it added, " neutrals cannot expect that 
Germany, forced to fight for her existence, shall, for 
the sake of neutral interest, restrict the use of an 
effective weapon if her enemy is permitted to continue 
to apply at will methods of warfare violating the rules 
of international law. Such a demand would be incom- 
patible with the character of neutrality, and the Ger- 
man Government is convinced that the Government of 
the United States does not think of making such a 
demand, knowing that the Government of the United 
States has repeatedly declared that it is determined 
to restore the principle of the freedom of the seas, 
from whatever quarter it has been violated." 

To this the Government of the United States re- 
plied on the eighth of May, accepting, of course, the 
assurances given, but adding, 

The Government of the United States feels it necessary 
to state that it takes it for granted that the Imperial Ger- 
man Government does not intend to imply that the main- 
tenance of its newly announced policy is in any way con- 
tingent upon the course or result of diplomatic negotiations 
between the Government of the United States and any 
other belligerent Government, notwithstanding the fact that 
certain passages in the Imperial Government's note of the 
4th instant might appear to be susceptible of that construc- 
tion. In order, however, to avoid any possible misunder- 
standing, the Government of the United States notifies the 
Imperial Government that it cannot for a moment enter- 
tain, much less discuss, a suggestion that respect by German 
naval authorities for the rights of citizens of the United 
States upon the high seas should in any way or in the 
slightest degree be made contingent nipon the conduct of 
any other Government affecting the rights of neutrals and 
noncombatants. Responsibility in such matters is single, 
not joint: absolute, not relative. 

To this note of the eighth of May, the Imperial 
German Government made no reply. 

On the thirty-first of January, the Wednesday of 
the present week, the German Ambassador handed to 
the Secretary of State, along with a formal note, a 
memorandum which contains the following statement: 

The Imperial Government, therefore, does not doubt that 
the Government of the United States will understand the 
situation thus forced upon Germany by the Entente-Allies' 
brutal methods of war and by their determination to 
destroy the Central Powers, and that the Government of 
the United States will further realize that the now openly 
disclosed intentions of the Entente-Allies give back to Ger- 
many the freedom of action which she reserved in her note 
addressed to the Government of the United States on May 
4, 1916. 

Under these circumstances Germany will meet the illegal 
measures of her enemies by forcibly preventing after Febru- 
ary 1, 1917, in a zone around Great Britain, France, Italy, 
and in the Eastern Mediterranean all navigation, that of 
neutrals included, from and to England and from and to 



France, etc., etc. All ships met within the zone will be 
sunk. 

I think that you will agree with me that, in view 
of this declaration, which suddenly and without prior 
intimation of any kind deliberately withdraws the sol- 
emn assurance given in the Imperial Government's 
note of the fourth of May, 1916, this Government has 
no alternative consistent with the dignity and honor 
of the United States but to take the course which, in 
its note of the eighteenth of April, 1916, it announced 
that it would take in the event that the German Gov- 
ernment did not declare and effect an abandonment of 
the methods of submarine warfare which it was then 
employing and to which it now purposes again to re- 
sort. 

I have, therefore, directed the Secretary of State to 
announce to His Excellency the German Ambassador 
that all diplomatic relations between the United States 
and the German Empire are severed, and that the 
American Ambassador at Berlin will immediately be 
withdrawn; and, in accordance with this decision, to 
hand to His Excellency his passports. 

Notwithstanding this unexpected action of the Ger- 
man Government, this sudden and deeply deplorable 
renunciation of its assurances, given this Government 
at one of the most critical moments of tension in the 
relations of the two governments, I refuse to believe 
that it is the intention of the German authorities to do 
in fact what they have warned us they will feel at 
liberty to do. I cannot bring myself to believe that 
they will indeed pay no regard to the ancient friend- 
ship between their people and our own or to the sol- 
emn obligations which have been exchanged between 
them and destroy American ships and take the lives 
of American citizens in the wilful prosecution of the 
ruthless naval program they have announced their 
intention to adopt. Only actual overt acts on their 
part can make me believe it even now. 

If this inveterate confidence on my part in the so- 
briety and prudent foresight of their purpose should 
unhappily prove unfounded ; if American ships and 
American lives should in fact be sacrificed by their 
naval commanders in heedless contravention of the 
just and reasonable understandings of international 
law and the obvious dictates of humanity, I shall take 
the liberty of coming again before the Congress, to 
ask that authority be given me to use any means that 
may be necessary for the protection of our seamen 
and our people in the prosecution of their peaceful 
and legitimate errands on the high seas. I can do 
nothing less. I take it for granted that all neutral 
governments will take the same course. 

We do not desire any hostile conflict with the Im- 
perial German Government. We are the sincere 
friends of the German people and earnestly desire to 
remain at peace with the Government which speaks 
for them. We shall not believe that they are hostile 
to us unless and until we are obliged to believe it ; and 
we purpose nothing more than the reasonable defense 
of the undoubted rights of our people. We wish to 
serve no selfish ends. We seek merely to stand true 



PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 



alike in thought and in action to the immemorial prin- 
ciples of our people which I sought to express in my 
address to the Senate only two weeks ago — seek 
merely to vindicate our right to liberty and justice 
and an unmolested life. These are the bases of peace, 
not war. God grant we may not be challenged to de- 
fend them by acts of wilful injustice on the part of 
the Government of Germany ! 

Address to Congress Advising that War Be 
Declared Against Germany, April 2, 1917. 

Gentlemen of the Congress: 

I have called the Congress into extraordinary ses- 
sion because there are serious, very serious, choices of 
policy to be made, and made immediately, which it 
was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that 
I should assume the responsibility of making. 

On the third of February last I officially laid 
before you the extraordinary announcement of the 
Imperial German Government that on and after the 
first day of February it was its purpose to put aside 
all restraints of law or of humanity and use its sub- 
marines to sink every vessel that sought to approach 
either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the 
western coasts of Europe or any of the ports con- 
trolled by the enemies of Germany within the Medi- 
terranean. That had seemed to be the object of the 
German submarine warfare earlier in the war, but 
since April of last year the Imperial Government had 
somewhat restrained the commanders of its undersea 
craft in conformity with its promise then given to us 
that passenger boats should not be sunk and that due 
warning would be given to all other vessels which its 
submarines might seek to destroy, when no resistance 
was offered or escape attempted, and care taken that 
their crews were given at least a fair chance to save 
their lives in their open boats. The precautions taken 
were meagre and haphazard enough, as was proved in 
distressing instance after instance in the progress of 
the cruel and unmanly business, but a certain degree 
of restraint was observed. The new policy has swept 
every restriction aside. Vessels of every kind, what- 
ever their flag, their character, their cargo, their des- 
tination, their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to the 
bottom without warning and without thought of help 
or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly 
neutrals along with those of belligerents. Even hos- 
pital ships and ships carrying relief to the sorely be- 
reaved and stricken people of Belgium, though the 
latter were provided with safe conduct through the 
proscribed areas by the German Government itself 
and were distinguished by unmistakable marks of 
identity, have been sunk with the same reckless lack 
of compassion or of principle. 

I was for a little while unable to believe that such 
things would in fact be done by any government that 
had hitherto subscribed to the humane practices of 
civilized nations. International law had its origin 
in the attempt to set up some law which would be re- 
spected and observed upon the seas, where no nation 
had right of dominion and where lay the free high- 



ways of the world. By painful stage after stage has 
that law been built up, with meagre enough results, 
indeed, after all was accomplished that could be ac- 
complished, but always with a clear view, at least, 
of what the heart and conscience of mankind de- 
manded. This minimum of right the German Govern- 
ment has swept aside under the plea of retaliation 
and necessity and because it had no weapons which 
it could use at sea except these which it is impossible 
to employ as it is employing them without throwing 
to the winds all scruples of humanity or of respect 
for the understandings that were supposed to underlie 
the intercourse of the world. I am not now thinking 
of the loss of property involved, immense and serious 
as that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale de- 
struction of the lives of non-combatants, men, women, 
and children, engaged in pursuits which have always, 
even in the darkest periods of modern history, been 
deemed innocent and legitimate. Property can be 
paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people 
cannot be. The present German submarine warfare 
against commerce is a warfare against mankind. 

It is a war against all nations. American ships 
have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways which 
it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, but the ships 
and people of other neutral and friendly nations have 
been sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in the same 
way. There has been no discrimination. The chal- 
lenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for 
itself how it will meet it. The choice we make for 
ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel 
and a temperateness of judgment befitting our char- 
acter and our motives as a nation. We must put ex- 
cited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge 
or the victorious assertion of the physical might of 
the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human 
right, of which we are only a single champion. 

When I addressed the Congress on the twenty-sixth 
of February last I thought that it would suffice to 
assert our neutral rights with arms, our right to use 
the seas against unlawful interference, our right to 
keep our people Safe against unlawful violence. But 
armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable. 
Because submarines are in effect outlaws when used 
as the German submarines have been used against 
merchant shipping, it is impossible to defend ships 
against their attacks as the law of nations has as- 
sumed that merchantmen would defend themselves 
against privateers or cruisers, visible craft giving 
chase upon the open sea. It is common prudence in 
such circumstances, grim necessity, indeed, to en- 
deavor to destroy them before they have shown their 
own intention. They must be dealt with upon sight, 
if dealt with at all. The German Government denies 
the right of neutrals to use arms at all within the 
areas of the sea which it has proscribed, even in the 
defense of rights which no modern publicist has ever 
before questioned their right to defend. The intima- 
tion is conveyed that the armed guards which we have 
placed on our merchant ships will be treated as be- 
yond the pale of law and subject to be dealt with as 
pirates would be. Armed neutrality is ineffectual 



WAR REPRINTS, NO. 6. 



enough at best; in such circumstances and in the face 
of such pretensions it is worse than ineffectual; it is 
likely only to produce what it was meant to prevent; 
it is practically certain to draw us into the war with- 
out either the rights or the effectiveness of belliger- 
ents. There is one choice we cannot make, we are in- 
capable of making: we will not choose the path of 
submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our 
nation and our people to be ignored or violated. The 
wrongs against which we now array ourselves are no 
common wrongs : they cut to the very roots of human 
life. 

With a profound sense of the solemn and even 
tragical character of the step I am taking and of the 
grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesi- 
tating obedience to what I deem my constitutional 
duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent 
course of the Imperial German Government to be in 
fact nothing less than war against the government and 
people of the United States; that it formally accept 
the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust 
upon it; and that it take immediate steps not only to 
put the country in a more thorough state of defense 
but also to exert all its power and employ all its re- 
sources to bring the Government of the German Em- 
pire to terms and end the war. 

What this will involve is clear. It will involve the 
utmost practicable co-operation in counsel and action 
with the governments now at war with Germany, and. 
as incident to that, the extension to those governments 
of the most liberal financial credits, in order that our 
resources may so far as possible be added to theirs. 
It will involve the organization and mobilization of all 
the material resources of the country to supply the 
materials of war and serve the incidental needs of 
the nation in the most abundant and yet the most 
economical and efficient way possible. It will involve 
the immediate full equipment of the navy in all re- 
spects but particularly in supplying it with the best 
means of dealing with the enemy's submarines. It 
will involve the immediate addition to the armed 
forces of the United States already provided for by 
law in case of war at least five hundred thousand men, 
who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the princi- 
ple of universal liability to service, and also the au- 
thorization of subsequent additional increments of 
equal force so soon as they may be needed and can 
be handled in training. It will involve also, of course, 
the granting of adequate credits to the Government, 
sustained, I hope, so far as they can equitably be 
sustained by the present generation, by well conceived 
taxation. 

I say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxa- 
tion because it seems to me that it would be most un- 
wise to base the credits which will now be necessary 
entirely on money borrowed. It is our duty, I most 
respectfully urge, to protect our people so far as we 
may against the very serious hardships and evils 
which would be likely to arise out of the inflation 
which would be produced by vast loans. 

In carrying out the measures by which these things 
are to be accomplished we should keep constantly in 



mind the wisdom of interfering as little as possible in 
our own preparation and in the equipment of our own 
military forces with the duty — for it will be a very 
practical duty — of supplying the nations already at 
war with Germany with the materials which they can 
obtain only from us or by our assistance. They are 
in the field and we should help them in every way to 
be effective there. 

I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through the 
several executive departments of the Government, for 
the consideration of your committees, measures for 
the accomplishment of the several objects I have men- 
tioned. I hope that it will be your pleasure to deal 
with them as having been framed after very careful 
thought by the branch of the Government upon which 
the responsibility of conducting the war and safe- 
guarding the nation will most directly fall. 

While we do these things, these deeply momentous 
things, let us be very clear, and make very clear to all 
the world what our motives and our objects are. My 
own thought has not been driven from its habitual 
and normal course by the unhappy events of the last 
two months, and I do not believe that the thought of 
the nation has been altered or clouded by them. I 
have exactly the same things in mind now that I had 
in mind when I addressed the Senate on the twenty- 
second of January last; the same that I had in mind 
when I addressed the Congress on the third of Feb- 
ruary and on the twenty-sixth of February. Our ob- 
ject now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of 
peace and justice in the life of the world as against 
selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst 
the really free and self-governed peoples of the world 
such a concert of purpose and of action as will hence- 
forth ensure the observance of those principles. Neu- 
trality is no longer feasible or desirable where the 
peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its 
peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom 
lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed 
by organized force which is controlled wholly by their 
will, not by the will of their people. We have seen 
the last of neutrality in such circumstances. We are 
at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted 
that the same standards of conduct and responsibility 
for wrong done shall be observed among nations and 
their governments that are observed among the indi- 
vidual citizens of civilized states. 

We have no quarrel with the German people. We 
have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy 
and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that 
their government acted in entering this war. It was 
not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was 
a war determined upon as wars used to be determined 
upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were 
nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were pro- 
voked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of 
little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed 
to use their fellow men as pawns and tools. Self- 
governed nations do not fill their neighbor states 
with spies or set the course of intrigue to bring about 
some critical posture of affairs which will give them 
an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such 



PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 



designs can be successfully worked out only under 
cover and where no one has the right to ask ques- 
tions. Cunningly contrived plans of deception or 
aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to gen- 
eration, can be worked out and kept from the light 
only within the privacy of courts or behind the care- 
fully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged 
class. They are happily impossible where public 
opinion commands and insists upon full information 
concerning all the nation's affairs. 

A steadfast concert for peace can never be main- 
tained except by a partnership of democratic nations. 
No autocratic government could be trusted to keep 
faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be 
a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue 
would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner cir- 
cles who could plan what the}' would and render ac- 
count to no one would be a corruption seated at its 
very heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose 
and their honor steady to a common end and prefer 
the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of 
their own. 

Does not every American feel that assurance has 
been added to our hope for the future peace of the 
world by the wonderful and heartening things that 
have been happening within the last few weeks in 
Russia ? Russia was known by those who knew it 
best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, 
in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the inti- 
mate relationships of her people that spoke their nat- 
ural instinct, their habitual attitude towards life. The 
autocracy that crowned the summit of her political 
structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the 
reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, 
character, or purpose ; and now it has been shaken off 
and the great, generous Russian people have been 
added in all their native majesty and might to the 
forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for 
justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a 
League of Honor. 

One of the things that has served to convince us 
that the Prussian autocracy was not and could never 
be our friend is that .from the very outset of the pres- 
ent war it has filled our unsuspecting communities and 
even our offices of government with spies and set 
criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our na- 
tional unity of counsel, our peace within and without, 
our industries and our commerce. Indeed, it is now 
evident that its spies were here even before the war 
began; and it is unhappily not a matter of conjecture 
but a fact proved in our courts of justice that the 
intrigues which have more than once come perilously 
near to disturbing the peace and dislocating the in- 
dustries of the country have been carried on at the 
instigation, with the support, and even under the per- 
sonal direction of official agents of the Imperial Gov- 
ernment accredited to the Government of the United 
States. Even in checking these things and trying to 
extirpate them we have sought to put the most gener- 
ous interpretation possible upon them because we 
knew that their source lay, not in any hostile feeling 
or purpose of the German people towards us (who 



were, no doubt, as ignorant of them as we ourselves 
were), but only in the selfish designs of a Govern- 
ment that did what it pleased and told its people noth- 
ing. But they have played their part in serving to 
convince us at last that that Government entertains 
no real friendship for us and means to act against our 
peace and security at its convenience. That it means 
to stir up enemies against us at our very doors the in- 
tercepted note to the German Minister at Mexico City 
is eloquent evidence. 

We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose 
because we know that in such a government, follow- 
ing such methods, we can never have a friend ; and 
that in the presence of its organized power, always 
lying in wait to accomplish we know not what pur- 
pose, there can be no assured security for the demo- 
cratic governments of the world. We are now about 
to accept gauge of battle with this natural foe to lib- 
erty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of 
the nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its 
power. We are glad, now that we ee the facts with 
no veil of false pretence about them, to fight thus for 
the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation 
of its peoples, the German peoples included ; for the 
rights of nations great and small and the privilege of 
men everywhere to choose their way of life and of 
obedience. The world must be made safe for democ- 
racy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested 
foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish 
ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. 
We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material 
compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. 
We are but one of the champions of the rights of man- 
kind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have 
been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of 
nations can make them. 

Just because we fight without rancor and without 
selfish object, seeking nothing for ourselves but what 
we shall wish to share with all free peoples, we shall, 
I feel confident, conduct our operations as belligerents 
without passion and ourselves observe with proud 
punctilio the principles of right and of fair play we 
profess to be fighting for. 

I have said nothing of the governments allied with 
the Imperial Government of Germany because they 
have not made war upon us or challenged us to de- 
fend our right and cur honor. The Austro-Hun- 
garian Government has, indeed, avowed its unquali- 
fied endorsement and acceptance of the reckless and 
lawless submarine warfare adopted now without dis- 
guise by the Imperial German Government, and it 
has therefore not been possible for this Government 
to receive Count Tarnowski, the Ambassador recently 
accredited to this Government by the Imperial and 
Royal Government of Austria-Hungary; but that 
Government has not actually engaged in warfare 
against citizens of the United States on the seas, and 
I take the liberty, for the present at least, of post- 
poning a discussion of our relations with the authori- 
ties at Vienna. We enter this war only where we are 
clearly forced into it because there are no other means 
of defending our rights. 



10 



WAR REPRINTS, XO. 6. 



It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves 
as belligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness 
because we act without animus, not in enmity towards 
-a people or with the desire to bring any injury or dis- 
advantage upon them, but only in armed opposition 
to an irresponsible government which has thrown 
aside all considerations of humanity and of right and 
is running amuck. We are, let me say again, the sin- 
cere friends of the German people, and shall desire 
nothing so much as the early re-establishment of inti- 
mate relations of mutual advantage between us — how- 
ever hard it may be for them, for the time being, to 
believe that this is spoken from our hearts. We have 
borne with their present government through all these 
bitter months because of that friendship — exercising 
a patience and forbearance which would otherwise 
have been impossible. We shall, happily, still have 
an opportunity to prove that friendship in our daily 
attitude and actions towards the millions of men and 
women of German birth and native sympathy who 
live amongst us and share our life, and we shall be 
proud to prove it towards all who are in fact loyal to 
their neighbors and to the Government in the hour of 
test. They are, most of them, as true and loyal 
Americans as if they had never known any other 
fealty or allegiance. They will be prompt to stand 
with us in rebuking and restraining the few who may 
be of a different mind and purpose. If there should 
be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand 
of stern repression; but, if it lifts its head at all, it 
will lift it only here and there and without coun- 
tenance except from a lawless and rralignant few. 

It is a distressing and oppressive duty, gentlemen 
of the Congress, which I have performed in thus ad- 
dressing you. There are, it may be, many months of 
fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful 
thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into 
the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civiliza- 
tion itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right 
is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for 
the things which we have always carried nearest our 
hearts, for democracy, for the right of those who sub- 
mit to authority to have a voice in their own govern- 
ments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, 
for a universal dominion of right by such a concert 
of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all 
nations and make the world itself at last free. To 
such a task we can dedicate our lives and our for- 
tunes, everything that we are and everything that we 
have, with the pride of those who know that the day 
has come when America is privileged to spend her 
blood and her might for the principles that gave her 
birth and happiness and the peace which she has 
treasured. God helping her, she can do no other. 

Proclamation Calling Upon All to Speak, Act 
and Serve Together. 
April 16, 1917. 
My Fellow-Countrymen: 

The entrance of our own beloved country into the 
grim and terrible war for democracy and human 
rights which has shaken the world creates so many 



problems of national life and action which call for im- 
mediate consideration and settlement that I hope you. 
will permit me to address to you a few words- of 
earnest counsel and appeal with regard to them. 

We are rapidly putting our navy upon an efficient 
war footing, and are about to create and equip a. 
great army, but these are the simplest parts of the 
great task to which we have addressed ourselves. 
There is not a single selfish element, so far as- 1 can: 
see, in the cause we are fighting for. We are fight- 
ing for what we believe and wish to be the rights of. 
mankind and for the future peace and security of the 
world. To do this great thing worthily and success- 
fully we must devote ourselves to the service without 
regard to profit or material advantage and with an. 
energy and intelligence that will rise to the level of 
the enterprise itself. We must realize to the full how 
great the task is and how many things, how many 
kinds and elements of capacity and service and self- 
sacrifice, it involves. 

These, then, are the things we must do, and do well, 
besides fighting — the things without which mere fight- 
ing would be fruitless: 

We must supply abundant food for ourselves and 
for our armies and our seamen not only, but also for 
a large part of the nations with whom we have now 
made common cause, in whose support and by whose 
sides we shall be righting; 

We must supply ships by the huiodreds out of our 
shipyards to carry to the other side of the sea, sub- 
marines or no submarines, what will every day be 
needed there, and abundant materials out of our fields 
and our mines and our factories with which not only 
to clothe and equip our own forces on land and sea, but 
also to clothe and support our people for whom the 
gallant fellows under arms can no longer work, to help 
clothe and equip the armies with which we are co-oper- 
ating in Europe, and to keep the looms and manufac- 
tories there in raw material ; coal to keep the fires going 
in ships at sea and in the furnaces of hundreds of fac- 
tories across the sea ; steel out of which to make arms 
and ammunition both here and there; rails for worn- 
out railways back of the fighting fronts ; locomotives 
and rolling stock to take the place of those every day 
going to pieces ; mules, horses, cattle for labor and for 
military service ; everything with which the people of 
England and France and Italy and Russia have 
usually supplied themselves but cannot now afford the 
men, the materials, or the machinery to make. 

It is evident to every thinking man that our indus- 
tries, on the farms, in the shipyards, in the mines, in 
the factories, must be made more prolific and more 
efficient than ever, and that they must be more 
economically managed and better adapted to the par- 
ticular requirements of our task than they have been ; 
and what I want to say is that the men and the women 
who devote their thought and their energy to these 
things will be serving the country and conducting the 
fight for peace and freedom just as truly and just as 
effectively as the men on the battlefield or in the 
trenches. The industrial forces of the country, men 
and women alike, will be a great national, a great 



PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 



11 



international, Service Army — a notable and honored 
host engaged in the service of the nation ^nd the 
world, the efficient friends and saviors of free men 
everywhere. Thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands, 
of men otherwise liable to military service will of 
right and of necessity be excused from that service 
and assigned to the fundamental, sustaining work of 
-the fields and factories and mines, and they will be as 
much part of the great patriotic forces of the nation 
as the men under fire. 

I take the liberty, therefore, of addressing this 
word to the farmers of the country and to all who 
work on the farms : The supreme need of our own 
nation and of the nations with which we are co- 
operating is an abundance of supplies, and especially 
of food stuffs. The importance of an adequate food 
supply, especially for the present year, is superlative. 
Without abundant food, alike for the armies and the 
peoples now at war, the whole great enterprise upon 
which we have embarked will break down and fail. 
The world's food reserves are low. Not only during 
the present emergency but for some time after peace 
shall have come both our own people and a large pro- 
portion of the people of Europe must rely upon the 
harvests in America. Upon the farmers of this coun- 
try, therefore, in large measure, rests the fate of the 
war and the fate of the nations. May the nation not 
count upon them to omit no step that will increase the 
production of their land or that will bring about the 
most effectual co-operation in the sale and distribution 
of their products ? The time is short. It is of the 
most imperative importance that everything possible 
be done and done immediately to make sure of large 
harvests. I call upon young men . nd old alike and 
upon the able-bodied boys of the land to accept and 
act upon this duty — to turn in hosts to the farms and 
make certain that no pains and no labor is lacking in 
this great matter. 

I particularly appeal to the farmers of the South 
to plant abundant food stuffs as well as cotton. They 
can show their patriotism in no better or more con- 
vincing way than by resisting the great temptation of 
the present price of cotton and helping, helping upon 
a great scale, to feed the nation and the peoples 
everywhere who are fighting for their liberties and for 
our own. The variety of their crops will be the visi- 
ble measure of their comprehension of their national 
duty. 

The Government of the United States and the gov- 
ernments of the several States stand ready to co- 
operate. They will do everything possible to assist 
farmers in securing an adequate supply of seed, an 
adequate force of laborers when they are most needed, 
at harvest time, and the means of expediting ship- 
ments of fertilizers and farm machinery, as well as of 
the crops themselves when harvested. The course of 
trade shall be as unhampered as it is possible to make 
it, and there shall be no unwarranted manipulation 
of the nation's food supply by those who handle it on 
its way to the consumer. This is our opportunity to 
demonstrate the efficiency of a great Democracy and 
we shall not fall short of it! 



This let me say to the middlemen of every sort, 
whether they are handling our food stuffs or our raw 
materials of manufacture or the products of our mills 
and factories: The eyes of the country will be espe- 
cially upon you. This is your opportunity for signal 
service, efficient and disinterested. The country ex- 
pects you, as it expects all others, to forego unusual 
profits, to organize and expedite shipments of supplies 
of every kind, but especially of food, with an eye to 
the service you are rendering and in the spirit of those 
who enlist in the ranks for their people, not for them- 
selves. I shall confidently expect you to deserve and 
win the confidence of people of every sort and sta- 
tion. 

To the men who run the railways of the country, 
whether they be managers or operative employees, let 
me say that the railways are the arteries of the na- 
tion's life and that upon them rests the immense re- 
sponsibility of seeing to it that those arteries suffer no 
obstruction of any kind, no inefficiency or slackened 
power. To the merchant let nie suggest the motto, 
" Small profits and quick service ; " and to the ship- 
builder the thought that the life of the war depends 
upon him. The food and the war supplies must be 
carried across the seas no matter how many ships are 
sent to the bottom. The places of those that go dowif 
must be supplied and supplied at once. To the miner 
let me say that he stands where the farmer does : the 
work of the world waits on him. If he slackens or 
fails, armies and statesmen are helpless. He also is 
enlisted in the great Service Army. The manufac- 
turer does not need to be told, I hope, that the nation 
looks to him to speed and perfect every process ; and 
I want only to remind his employees that their ser- 
vice is absolutely indispensable and is counted on by 
every man who loves the country and its liberties. 

Let me suggest, also, that everyone who creates or 
cultivates a garden helps, and helps greatly, to solve 
the problem of the feeding of the nations ; and that 
every housewife who practices strict economy puts 
herself in the ranks of those who serve the nation. 
This is the time for America to correct her unpardon- 
able fault of wastefulness and extravagance. Let 
every man and every woman assume the duty of care- 
ful, provident use and expenditure as a public duty, 
as a dictate of patriotism which no one can now ex- 
pect ever to be excused or forgiven for ignoring. 

In the hope that this statement of the needs of the 
nation and of the world in this hour of supreme crisis 
may stimulate those to whom it comes and remind all 
who need reminder of the solemn duties of a time snch 
as the world has never seen before, I beg that all 
editors and publishers everywhere will give as promi- 
nent publication and as wide circulation as possible to 
this appeal. I venture to suggest, also, to all adver- 
tising agencies that they would perhaps render a very 
substantial and timely service to the country if they 
would give it widespread repetition. And I hope 
that clergymen will not think the theme of it an un- 
worthy or inappropriate subject of comment and 
homily from their pulpits. 



12 



WAR REPRINTS. NO. 6. 



The supreme test of the nation has come. We must 
all speak, act, and serve together ! 

Woodrow Wilson. 

Flag Day Address, Washington, D. C. 
June 14, 1917. 
My Fellow Citizens: 

We meet to celebrate Flag Day because this flag 
which we honor and under which we serve is the 
emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and pur- 
pose as a nation. It has no other character than that 
which we give it from generation to generation. The 
choices are ours. It floats in majestic silence above 
the hosts that execute those choices, whether in peace 
or in war. And yet, though silent, it speaks to us — 
speaks to us of the past, of the men and women who 
went before us and of the records they wrote upon it. 
We celebrate the day of its birth ; and from its birth 
until now it has witnessed a great history, has floated 
on high the symbol of great events, of a great plan 
of life worked out by a great people. We are about 
to carry it into battle, to lift it where it will draw 
the fire of our enemies. We are about to bid 
thousands, hundreds of thousands, it may be millions, 
of our men, the young, the strong, the capable men of 
the nation, to go forth and die beneath it on fields of 
blood far away — for what? For some unaccustomed 
thing? For something for which it has never sought 
the fire before? American armies were never before 
sent across the seas. Why are they sent now? For 
some new purpose, for which this great flag has never 
been carried before, or for some old, familiar, heroic 
purpose for which it has seen men, its own men, die 
on every battlefield upon which Americans have borne 
arms since the Revolution ? 

These are questions which must be answered. We 
are Americans. We in our turn serve America, and can 
serve her with no private purpose. We must use her 
flag as she has always used it. We are accountable 
at the bar of history and must plead in utter frank- 
ness what purpose it is we seek to serve. 

It is plain enough how we were forced into the war. 
The extraordinary insults and aggressions of the Im- 
perial German Government left us no self-respecting 
choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights 
as a free people and of our honor as a sovereign gov- 
ernment. The military masters of Germany denied 
us the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspect- 
ing communities with vicious spies and conspirators 
and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in 
their own behalf. M'hen they found that they could 
not do that, their agents diligently spread sedition 
amongst us and sought to draw our own citizens from 
their allegiance — and some of those agents were men 
connected with the official Embassy of the German 
Government itself here in our own capital. They 
sought by violence to destroy our industries and arrest 
our commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to take 
up arms against us and to draw Japan into a hostile 
alliance with her — and that, not by indirection, but 
by direct suggestion from the Foreign Office in Ber- 
lin. They impudently denied us the use of the high 



seas and repeatedly executed their threat that they 
would send to their death any of our people who ven- 
tured to approach the coasts of Europe. And many 
of our own people were corrupted. Men began to 
look upon their own neighbors with suspicion and to 
wonder in their hot resentment and surprise whether 
there was any community in which hostile intrigue 
did not lurk. What great nation in such circum- 
stances would not have taken up arms ? Much as we 
had desired peace, it was denied us, and not of our 
own choice. This flag under which we serve would 
have been dishonored had we withheld our hand. 

But that is only part of the story. We know now 
as clearly as we knew before we were ourselves en- 
gaged that we are not the enemies of the German peo- 
ple, and that they are not our enemies. They did not 
originate or desire this hideous war or wish that we 
should be drawn into it; and we are vaguely conscious 
that we are fighting their cause, as they will some day 
see it, as well as our own. They are themselves in 
the grip of the same sinister power that has now at 
last stretched its ugly talons out and drawn blood 
from us. The whole world is at war because the 
whole world is in the grip of that power and is trying 
out the great battle which shall determine whether it 
is to be brought under its mastery or fling itself free. 

The war was begun by the military masters of Ger- 
many, who proved to be also the masters of Austria- 
Hungary. These men have never regarded nations 
as peoples, men, women, and children of like blood 
and frame as themselves, for whom governments ex- 
isted and in whom governments had their life. They 
have regarded them merely as serviceable organiza- 
tions which they could by force or intrigue bend or 
corrupt to their own purpose. They have regarded 
the smaller states, in particular, and the peoples who 
could be overwhelmed by force, as their natural tools 
and instruments of domination. Their purpose has 
long been avowed. The statesmen of other nations, 
to whom that purpose was incredible, paid little at- 
tention ; regarded what German professors expounded 
in their classrooms and German writers set forth to 
the world as the goal of German policy as rather the 
dream of minds detached from practical affairs, as 
preposterous private conceptions of German destiny, 
than as the actual plans of responsible rulers ; but the 
rulers of Germany themselves knew all the while what 
concrete plans, what well advanced intrigues lay back 
of what the professors and the writers were saying, 
and were glad to go forward unmolested, filling the 
thrones of Balkan states with German princes, put- 
ting German officers at the service of Turkey to drill 
her armies and make interest with her government, 
developing plans of sedition and rebellion in India and 
Egypt, setting their fires in Persia. The demands 
made by Austria upon Servia were a mere single step 
in a plan which compassed Europe and Asia, from 
Berlin to Bagdad. They hoped those demands might 
not arouse Europe, but they meant to press them 
whether they did or not, for they thought themselves 
ready for the final issue of arms. 

Their plan was to throw a broad belt of German 



PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 



13 



military power and political control across the very 
center of Europe and beyond the Mediterranean into 
the heart of Asia; and Austria-Hungary was to be as 
much their tool and pawn as Servia or Bulgaria or 
Turkey or the ponderous states of the East. Austria- 
Hungary, indeed, was to become part of the central 
German Empire, absorbed and dominated by the same 
forces and influences that had originally cemented the 
German states themselves. The dream had its heart 
at Berlin. It could have had a heart nowhere else ! 
It rejected the idea of solidarity of race entirely. 
The choice of peoples played no part in it at all. It 
contemplated binding together racial and political 
units which could be kept together only by force — 
Czechs, Magyars, Croats, Serbs, Roumanians, Turks, 
Armenians — the proud states of Bohemia and Hun- 
gary, the stout little commonwealths of the Balkans, 
the indomitable Turks, the subtle peoples of the East. 
These peoples did not wish to be united. They 
ardently desired to direct their own affairs, would be 
satisfied only by undisputed independence. They 
could be kept quiet only by the presence or the con- 
stant threat of armed men. They would live under a 
common power only by sheer compulsion and await 
the day of revolution. But the German military 
statesmen had reckoned with all that and were ready 
to deal with it in their own way. 

And they have actually carried the greater part of 
that amazing plan into execution ! Look how things 
stand. Austria is at their mercy. It has acted, not 
upon its own initiative or upon the choice of its own 
people, but at Berlin's dictation ever since the war 
began. Its people now desire peace, but cannot have 
it until leave is granted from Berlin. The so-called 
Central Powers are in fact but a single Power. Ser- 
via is at its mercy, should its hands be but for a mo- 
ment freed. Bulgaria has consented to its will, and 
Roumania is overrun. The Turkish armies, which 
Germans trained, are serving Germany, certainly not 
themselves, and the guns of German warships lying 
in the harbor of Constantinople remind Turkish 
statesmen every day that they have no choice but to 
take their orders from Berlin. From Hamburg to 
the Persian Gulf the net is spread. 

Is it not easy to understand the eagerness for peace 
that has been manifested from Berlin ever since the 
snare was set and sprung? Peace, peace, peace has 
been the talk of her Foreign Office for now a year 
and more ; not peace upon her own initiative, but upon 
the initiative of the nations over which she now deems 
herself to hold the advantage. A little of the talk 
has been public, but most of it has been private. 
Through all sorts of channels it has come to me, and 
in all sorts of guises, but never with the terms dis- 
closed which the German Government would be will- 
ing to accept. That government has other valuable 
pawns in its hands besides those I have mentioned. 
It still holds a valuable part of France, though with 
slowly relaxing grasp, and practically the whole of 
Belgium. Its armies press close upon Russia and 
overrun Poland at their will. It cannot go further ; 
it dare not go back. It wishes to close its bargain 



before it is too late and it has little left to offer for 
the pound of flesh it will demand. 

The military masters under whom Germany is 
bleeding see very clearly to what point Fate has 
brought them. If they fall back or are forced back 
an inch, their power both abroad and at home will 
fall to pieces like a house of cards. It is their power 
at home they are thinking about now more than their 
power abroad. It is that power which is trembling 
under their very feet ; and deep fear has entered their 
hearts. They have but one chance to perpetuate their 
military power or even their controlling political influ- 
ence. If they can secure peace now with the im- 
mense advantages still in their hands which they have 
up to this point apparently gained, they will have jus- 
tified themselves before the German people ; they will 
have gained by force what they promised to gain by 
it: an immense expansion of German power, an im- 
mense enlargement of German industrial and commer- 
cial opportunities. Their prestige will be secure, and 
with their prestige their political power. If they fail, 
their people will thrust them aside ; a government ac- 
countable to the people themselves will be set up in 
Germany as it has been in England, in the United 
States, in France, and in all the great countries of the 
modern time except Germany. If they succeed they 
are safe and Germany and the world are undone; if 
they fail Germany is saved and the world will be at 
peace. If they succeed, America will fall within the 
menace. We and all the rest of the world must re- 
main armed, as. they will remain, and must make 
ready for the next step in their aggression ; if they 
fail, the world may unite for peace and Germany may 
be of the union. 

Do you not now understand the new intrigue, the 
intrigue for peace, and why the masters of Germany 
do not hesitate to use any agency that promises to 
effect their purpose, the deceit of the nations? Their 
present particular aim is to deceive all those who 
throughout the world stand for the rights of peoples 
and the self-government of nations ; for they see what 
immense strength the forces of justice and of liberal- 
ism are gathering out of this war. They are employ- 
ing liberals in their enterprise. They are using men, 
in Germany and without, as their spokesmen whom 
they have hitherto despised and oppressed, using them 
for their own destruction — socialists, the leaders of 
labor, the thinkers they have, hitherto sought to 
silence. Let them once succeed and these men, now 
their tools, will be ground to power beneath the weight 
of the great military empire they will have set up; 
the revolutionists in Russia will be cut off from all 
succor or co-operation in western Europe and a coun- 
ter revolution fostered and supported; Germany her- 
self will lose her chance of freedom; and all Europe 
will arm for the next, the final struggle. 

The sinister intrigue is being no less actively con- 
ducted in this country than in Russia and in every 
country in Europe to which the agents and dupes of 
the Imperial German Government can get access. 
That government has many spokesmen here, in places 
high and low. They have learned discretion. They 



H 



WAR REPRINTS. NO. 6. 



keep within the law. It is opinion they utter now, 
not sedition. They proclaim the liberal purposes of 
their masters ; declare this a foreign war which can 
touch America with no danger to either her lands or 
her institutions; set England at the centre of the 
stage and talk of her ambition to assert economic 
dominion throughout the world; appeal to our ancient 
tradition of isolation in the politics of the nations ; 
and seek to undermine the government with false pro- 
fessions of loyalty to its principles. 

But they will make no headway. The false betray 
themselves always in every accent. It is only friends 
and partisans of the German Government whom we 
have already identified who utter these thinly dis- 
guised loyalties. The facts are patent to all the 
world, and nowhere are they more plainly seen than 
in the United States, where we are accustomed to deal 
with facts and not with sophistries ; and the great 
fact that stands out above all the rest is that this is a 
People's War, a war for freedom and justice and self- 
gcvernment amongst all the nations of the world, a 
war to make the world safe for the peoples who live 
upon it and have made it their own, the German peo- 
ples themselves included; and that with us rests the 
choice to break through all these hypocricies and 
patent cheats and masks of brute force and help set 
the world free, or else stand aside and let it be domi- 
nated a long age through by sheer weight of arms and 
the arbitrary choices of self-constituted masters, by 
the nation which can maintain the biggest armies and 
the most irresistible armaments — a power to which 
the world has afforded no parallel and in the face of 
which political freedom must wither and perish. 

For us there is but one choice. We have made it. 
Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand 
in our way in this day of high resolution when every 
principle we hold dearest is to be vindicated and made 
secure for the salvation of the nations. We are ready 
to plead at the bar of history, and our flag shall wear 
a new lustre. Once more we shall make good with 
our lives and fortunes the great faith to which we 
were born, and a new glory shall shine in the face 
of our people. 

Address to Congress Upon the War Aims and 

Peace Terms of the United States 

January 8, 1918. 

Gentlemen of the Congress: 

Once more, as repeatedly before, the spokesmen of 
the Central Empires have indicated their desire to 
discuss the objects of the war and the possible basis 
of a general peace. Parleys have been in progress at 
Brest-Litovsk between Russian representatives and 
represenatives of the Central Powers to which the 
attention of all the belligerents has been invited for 
the purpose of ascertaining whether it may be possible 
to extend these parleys into a general conference with 
regard to terms of peace and settlement. 

The Russian representatives presented not only a 
perfectly definite statement of the principles upon 
which they would be willing to conclude peace, but 



also an equally definite program of the concrete appli- 
cation of those principles. The representatives of 
the Central Powers, on their part, presented an out- 
line of settlement which, if much less definite, seemed 
susceptible of liberal interpretation until their specific 
program of practical terms was added. That pro- 
gram proposed no concessions at all either to the 
sovereignty of Russia or to the preferences of the 
populations with whose fortunes it dealt, but meant, 
in a word, that the Central Empires were to keep 
every foot of territory their armed forces had occu- 
pied — every province, every city, every point of van- 
tage — as a permanent addition to their territories and 
their power. 

It is a reasonable conjecture that the general prin- 
ciples of settlement which they at first suggested 
originated with the more liberal statesmen of Germany 
and Austria, the men who have begun to feel the force 
of their own people's thought and purpose, while the 
concrete terms of actual settlement came from the 
military leaders who have no thought but to keep what 
they have got. The negotiations have been broken 
off. The Russian representatives were sincere and in 
earnest. They cannot entertain such proposals of 
conquest and domination. 

The whole incident is full of significance. It is 
also full of perplexity. With whom are the Russian 
representatives dealing? For whom are the repre- 
sentatives of the Central Empires speaking? Are 
they speaking for the majorities of their respective 
parliaments or for the minority parties, that military 
and imperialistc minority which has so far dominated 
their whole policy and controlled the affairs of Tur- 
key and of the Balkan states which have felt obliged 
to become their associates in this war? 

The Russian representatives have insisted, very 
justly, very wisely, and in the true spirit of modern 
democracy, that the conferences they have been hold- 
ing with the Teutonic and Turkish statesmen should 
be held within open, not closed, doors, and all the 
world has been audience, as was desired. To whom 
have we been listening, then? To those who speak 
the spirit and intention of the resolutions of the Ger- 
man Reichstag of the 9th of July last, the spirit and 
intention of the Liberal leaders and parties of Ger- 
many, or to those who resist and defy that spirit and 
intention and insist upon conquest and subjugation? 
Or are we listening, in fact, to both, unreconciled and 
in open and hopeless contradiction? These are very 
serious and pregnant questions. Upon the answer to 
them depends the peace of the world. 

But, whatever the results of the parleys at Brest- 
Litovsk, whatever the confusions of counsel and of 
purpose in the utterances of the spokesmen of the 
Central Empires, they have again attempted to ac- 
quaint the world with their objects in the war and 
have again challenged their adversaries to say what 
their objects are and what sort of settlement they 
would deem just and satisfactory. There is no good 
reason why that challenge should not be responded to, 
;ind responded to with the utmost candor. We did not 
wait for it. Not once, but again and again, we have 



PRESIDENT WILSONS WAR MESSAGES. 



15 



laid our whole thought and purpose before the worlds 
not in general terms only, but each time with suffi- 
cient definition to make it clear what sort of definite 
terms of settlement must necessarily spring out of 
them. Within the last week Mr. Lloyd George has 
spoken with admirable candor and in admirable spirit 
for the people and Government of Great Britain. 

There is no confusion of counsel among the adver- 
saries of the Central Powers, no uncertainty of prin- 
ciple, no vagueness of detail. The only secrecy of 
counsel, the only lack of fearless frankness, the only 
failure to make definite statement of the objects of 
the war, lies with Germany and her allies. The issues 
of life and death hang upon these definitions. No 
statesman who has the least conception' of his respon- 
sibility ought for a moment to permit himself to con- 
tinue this tragical and appalling outpouring of blood 
and treasure unless he is sure beyond a peradventure 
that the objects of the vital sacrifice are part and par- 
cel of the very life of Society and that the people for 
whom he speaks think them right and imperative as 
he does. 

There is, moreover, a voice calling for these defini- 
tions of principle and of purpose which is, it seems 
to me, more thrilling and more compelling than any 
of the many moving voices with which the troubled air 
of the world is filled. It is the voice of the Russian 
people. They are prostrate and all but helpless, it 
would seem, before the grim power of Germany, which 
has hitherto known no relenting and no pity. Their 
power, apparently, is shattered. And yet their soul 
is not subservient. They will not yield either in 
principle or in action. Their conception of what is 
right, of what is humane and honorable for them to 
accept, has been stated with a frankness, a largeness 
of view, a generosity of spirit, and a universal human 
sympathy which must challenge the admiration of 
every friend of mankind ; and they have refused to 
compound their ideals or desert others that they them- 
selves may be safe. 

They call to us to say what it is that we desire, in 
what, if in anything, our purpose and our spirit differ 
from theirs ; and I believe that the people of the 
United States would wish me to respond, with utter 
simplicity and frankness. Whether their present 
leaders believe it or not, it is our heartfelt desire and 
hope that some way may be opened whereby we may 
be privileged to assist the people of Russia to attain 
their utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace. 

It will be our wish and purpose that the processes 
of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely 
open and that they shall involve and permit hence- 
forth no secret understandings of any kind. The day 
of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also 
the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest 
of particular governments and likely at some unlooked- 
for moment to upset the peace of the world. It is 
this happy fact, now clear to the view of every public 
man whose thoughts do not still Lnger in an age that 
is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every 
nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and 
the peace of the world to avow now or at any other 
time the objects it has in view. 



We entered this war because violations of right had 
occurred which touched us to the quick and made the 
life of our own people impossible unless they were 
corrected and the world secure once for all against 
their recurrence. 

What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing 
peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit 
and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made 
safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our 
own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own in- 
stitutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by 
the other peoples of the world as against force and 
selfish aggression. 

All the peoples of the world are in effect partners 
in this interest, and for our own part we see very 
clearly that unless justice be done to others it will 
not be done to us. The program of the world's peace, 
therefore, is our program ; and that program, the only 
possible program, as we see it, is this : 

1. Open covenants of peace, openly ar- 
rived at, after which there shall be no pri- 
vate international understandings of any 
kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always 
frankly and in the public view. 

2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon 
the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in 
peace and in war, except as the seas may be 
closed in whole or in part by international 
action for the enforcement of international 
covenants. 

3. The removal, so far as possible, of all 
economic barriers and the establishment of 
an equality of trade conditions among all the 
nations consenting to the peace and associat- 
ing themselves for its maintenance. 

4. Adequate guarantees given and taken 
that national armaments will be reduced to 
the lowest points consistent with domestic 
safety. 

5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely 
impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, 
based upon a strict observance of the princi- 
ple that in determining all such questions 
of sovereignty the interests of the popula- 
tions concerned must have equal weight with 
the equitable claims of the government 
whose title is to be determined. 

6. The evacuation of all Russian territory 
and such a settlement of all questions affect- 
ing Russia as will secure the best and freest 
co-operation of the other nations of the 
world in obtaining for her an unhampered 
and unembarrassed opportunity for the. inde- 
pendent determination of her own political 
development and national policy and assure 
her of a sincere welcome into the society of 
free nations under institutions of her own 
choosing; and, more than a welcome, assist- 
ance also of every kind that she may need 
and may herself desire. The treatment ac- 
corded Russia by her sister nations in the 
months to come will be the acid test of their 
good will, of their comprehension of her 



16 



WAR REPRINTS. NO. 6. 



needs as distinguished from their own in- 
terests, and of their intelligent and un- 
selfish sympathy. 

7. Belgium, the whole world will agree, 
must be evacuated and restored, without any 
attempt to limit the sovereignty which she 
enjoys in common with all other free nations. 
No other single act will serve as this will 
serve to restore confidence among the nations 
in the laws which they have themselves set 
and determined for the government of their 
relations with one another. Without this 
healing act the whole structure and validity 
of international law is forever impaired. 

8. All French territory should be freed 
and the invaded portions restored, and the 
wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in 
the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has 
unsettled the peace of the world for nearly 
fifty years, should be righted, in order that 
peace may once more be made secure in the 
interest of all. 

9. A readjustment of the frontiers of 
Italy should be effected along clearly recog- 
nizable lines of nationality. 

10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, 
whose place among the nations we wish to 
see safeguarded and assured, should be ac- 
corded the freest opportunity of autonomous 
development. 

11. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro 
should be evacuated ; occupied territories 
restored ; Serbia accorded free and secure 
access to the sea ; and the relations of the 
several Balkan states to one another deter- 
mined by friendly counsel along historically 
established lines of allegiance and national- 
ity; and international guarantees of the po- 
litical and economic independence and ter- 
ritorial integrity of the several Balkan 
states should be entered into. 

12. The Turkish portions of the present 
Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure 
sovereignty, but the other nationalities 
which are now under Turkish rule should be 
assured an undoubted security of life and an 
absolutely unmolested opportunity of au- 
tonomous development, and the Dardanelles 
should be permanently opened as a free 
passage to the ships and commerce of all na- 
tions under international guarantees. 

13. An independent Polish state should 
be erected which should include the terri- 
tories inhabited by indisputably Polish 
populations, which should be assured a free 
and secure access to the sea, and whose 
political and economic independence and ter- 
ritorial integrity should be guaranteed by 
international covenant. 

14. A general association of nations must 
be formed under specific covenants for the 
purpose of affording mutual guarantees of 



political independence and territorial in- 
tegrity to great and small states alike. 

In regard to these essential rectifications of wrong 
and assertions of right we feel ourselves to be inti- 
mate partners of all the governments and peoples as- 
sociated together against the imperialists. We can- 
not be separated in interest or divided in purpose. 
We stand together until the end. 

For such arrangements and covenants we are will- 
ing to fight and to continue to fight until they are 
achieved ; but only because we wish the right to pre- 
vail and desire a just and stable peace such as can be 
secured only by removing the chief provocations to 
war, which this program does remove. 

We have no. jealousy of German greatness, and 
there is nothing in this program that impairs it. We 
grudge her no achievement or distinction of learning 
or of pacific enterprise such as have made her record 
very bright and very enviable. We do not wish to in- 
jure her or to block in any way her legitimate influ- 
ence or power. We do not wish to fight her either 
with arms or with hostile arrangements of trade if she 
is willing to associate herself with us and the other 
peace-loving nations of the world in covenants of jus- 
tice and law and fair dealing. 

We wish her only to accept a place of equality 
among the peoples of the world — the new world in 
which we now live — instead of a place of mastery. 

Neither do we presume to suggest to her any alter- 
ation or modification of her institutions. But it is 
necessary, we must frankly say, and necessary as a 
preliminary to any intelligent dealings with her on 
our part, that we should know whom her spokesmen 
speak for when they speak to us, whether for the 
Reichstag majority or for the military party and the 
men whose creed is imperial domination. 

We have spoken now, surely, in terms too concrete 
to admit of any further doubt or question. An evi- 
dent principle runs through the whole program I have 
outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peo- 
ples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal 
terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether 
they be strong or weak. 

Unless this principle be made its foundation no part 
of the structure of international justice can stand. 
The people of the United States could act upon no 
other principle ; and to the vindication of this princi- 
ple they are ready to devote their lives, their honor, 
and everything that they possess. The moral climax 
of this the culminating and final war for human lib- 
erty has come, and they are ready to put their own 
strength, their own highest purpose, their own integ- 
rity and devotion to the test. 

Address to Congress Upon the German and 

Austrian Peace Utterances 

February 11, 1918. 

Gentlemen of the Congress: 

On the eighth of January I had the honor of ad- 
dressing you on the objects of the war as our people 
conceive them. The Prime Minister of Great Britain 
had spoken in similar terms on the fifth of January. 



PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 



ir 



To these addresses the German Chancellor replied on 
the twenty-fourth and Count Czernin, for Austria, on 
the same day. It is gratifying to have our desire so 
promptly realized that all exchanges of view on this 
great matter should be made in the hearing of all the 
world. 

Count Czernin's reply, which is directed chiefly to 
my own address of the eighth of January, is uttered 
in a very friendly tone. He finds in my statement a 
sufficiently encouraging approach to the views of his 
own Government to justify him in believing that it 
furnishes a basis for a more detailed discussion of 
purposes by the two Governments. He is represented 
to have intimated that the views he was expressing 
had been communicated to me beforehand and that I 
was aware of them at the time he was uttering them; 
but in this I am sure he was misunderstood. I had 
received no intimation of what he intended to say. 
There was, of course, no reason why he should com- 
municate privately with me. I am quite content to be 
one of his public audience. 

Count von Hertling's reply is, I must say, very 
vague and very confusing. It is full of equivocal 
phrases and leads it is not clear where. But it is cer- 
tainly in a very different tone from that of Count 
Czernin, and apparently of an opposite purpose. It 
confirms, I am sorry to say, rather than removes, the 
unfortunate impression made by what we had learned 
of the conferences at Brest-Litovsk. His discussion 
and acceptance of our general principles lead him to 
no practical conclusions. He refuses to apply them 
to the substantive items which must constitute the 
body of any final settlement. He is jealous of inter- 
national action and of international counsel. He ac- 
cepts, he says, the principle of public diplomacy, but 
he appears to insist that it be confined, at any rate 
in this case, to generalities and that the several par- 
ticular questions of territory and sovereignty, the 
several questions upon whose settlement must depend 
the acceptance of peace by the twenty-three states 
now engaged in the war, must be discussed and set- 
tled, not in general council, but severally by the na- 
tions most immediately concerned by interest or neigh- 
borhood. He agrees that the seas should be free, but 
looks askance at any limitation to that freedom by 
international action in the interest of the common 
order. He would without reserve be glad to see eco- 
nomic barriers removed between nation and nation, 
for that could in no way impede the ambitions of the 
military party with whom he seems constrained to 
keep on terms. Neither does he raise objection to a 
limitation of armaments. That matter will be settled 
of itself, he thinks, by the economic conditions which 
must follow the war. But the German colonies, he 
demands, must be returned without debate. He will 
discuss with no one but the representatives of Russia 
what disposition shall be made of the people and the 
lands of the Baltic provinces; with no one but the 
Government of France the " conditions " under which 
French territory shall be evacuated ; and only with 
Austria what shall be done with Poland. In the de- 



termination of all questions affecting the Balkan 
states he defers, as I understand him, to Austria and 
Turkey ; and with regard to the agreements to be en- 
tered into concerning the non-Turkish peoples of the 
present Ottoman Empire, to the Turkish authorities 
themselves. After a settlement all around, effected 
in this fashion, by individual barter and concession, he 
would have no objection, if I correctly interpret his 
statement, to a league of nations which would under- 
take to hold the new- balance of power steady against 
external disturbance. 

It must be evident to everyone who understands 
what this war has wrought in the opinion and temper 
of the world that no general peace, no peace worth the 
infinite sacrifices of these years of tragical suffering, 
can possibly be arrived at in any such fashion. The 
method the German Chancellor proposes is the method 
of the Congress of Vienna. We cannot and will not 
return to that. What is at stake now is the peace of 
the world. What we are striving for is a new inter- 
national order based upon broad and universal prin- 
ciples of right and justice — no mere peace of shreds 
and patches. Is it possible that Count von Hertling 
does not see that, does not grasp it. is in fact living 
in his thought in a world dead and gone ? Has he 
utterly forgotten the Reichstag Resolutions of the 
nineteenth of July, or does he deliberately ignore 
them ? They spoke of the conditions of a general 
peace, not of national aggrandizement or of arrange- 
ments between state and state. The peace of the 
world depends upon the just settlement of each of the 
several problems to which I adverted in my recent 
address to the Congress. I, of course, do not mean 
that the peace of the world depends upon the accept- 
ance of any particular set of suggestions as to the 
way in which those problems are to be dealt with. I 
mean only that those problems each and all affect the 
whole world ; that unless they are dealt with in a 
spirit of unselfish and unbiased justice, with a view 
to the wishes, the natural connections, the racial as- 
pirations, the security, and the peace of mind of the 
peoples involved, no permanent peace will have been 
attained. They cannot be discussed separately or in 
corners. None of them constitutes a private or 
separate interest from which the opinion of the world 
may be shut out. Whatever affects the peace affects 
mankind, and nothing settled by military force, if 
settled wrong, is settled at all. It will presently 
have to be reopened. 

Is Count von Hertling not aware that he is speak- 
ing in the court of mankind, that all the awakened na- 
tions of the world now sit in judgment on what every 
public man. of whatever nation, may say on the issues 
of a conflict which has spread to every region of the 
world? The Reichstag Resolutions of July them- 
selves frankly accepted the decisions of that court. 
There shall be no annexations, no contributions, no 
punitive damages. Peoples are not to be handed 
about from one sovereignty to another by an inter- 
national conference or an understanding between 
rivals and antagonists. National aspirations must be 



18 



WAR REPRINTS, NO. 6. 



respected; peoples may now be dominated and gov- 
erned only by their own consent. " Self-determina- 
tion " is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative prin- 
ciple of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore 
at their peril. We cannot have general peace for the 
asking, or by the mere arrangements of a peace con- 
ference. It cannot be pieced together out of indi- 
vidual understandings between powerful states. All 
the parties to this war must join in the settlement of 
every issue anywhere involved in it; because what we 
are seeking is a peace that we can all unite to guar- 
antee and maintain and every item of it must be sub- 
mitted to the common judgment whether it be right 
and fair, an act of justice, rather than a bargain be- 
tween sovereigns. 

The United States has no desire to interfere in Eu- 
ropean affairs or to act as arbiter in European terri- 
torial disputes. She would disdain to take advantage 
of any internal weakness or disorder to impose her 
own will upon another people. She is quite ready to 
be shown that the settlements she has suggested are 
not the best or the most enduring. They are only her 
own provisional sketch of principles and of the way 
in which they should be applied. But she entered 
this war because she was made a partner, whether she 
would or not, in the sufferings and indignities in- 
flicted by the military masters of Germany, against 
the peace and security of mankind; and the condi- 
tions of peace will touch her as nearly as they will 
touch any other nation to which is entrusted a leading 
part in the maintenance of civilization. She cannot 
see her way to peace until the causes of this war are 
removed, its renewal rendered as nearly as may be im- 
possible. 

This war had its roots in the disregard of the rights 
of small nations and of nationalities which lacked 
the union and the force to make good their claim to 
determine their own allegiances and their own forms 
of political life. Covenants must now be entered into 
which will render such things impossible for the 
future; and those covenants must be backed by the 
united force of all the nations that love justice and 
are willing to maintain it at any cost. If territorial 
settlements and the political relations of great popu- 
lations which have not the organized power to resist 
are to be determined by the contracts of the powerful 
governments which consider themselves most directly 
affected, as Count von Hertling proposes, why may 
not economic questions also? It has come about in 
the altered world in which we now find ourselves that 
justice and the rights of peoples affect the whole field 
of international dealing as much as access to raw 
materials and fair and equal conditions of trade. 
Count von Hertling wants the essential bases of com- 
mercial and industrial life to be safeguarded by com- 
mon agreement and guarantee, but he cannot expect 
that to be conceded him if the other matters to be 
determined by the articles on peace are not handled 
in the same way as items in the final accounting. He 
cannot ask the benefit of common agreement in the 
one field without according it in the other. I take it 
for granted that he sees that separate and selfish 



compacts with regard to trade and the essential mate- 
rials of manufacture would afford no foundation for 
peace. Neither, he may rest assured, will separate 
and selfish compacts with regard to provinces and 
peoples. 

Count Czernin seems to see the fundamental ele- 
ments of peace with clear eyes and does not seek to 
obscure them. He sees that an independent Poland, 
made up of all the indisputably Polish peoples who 
lie contiguous to one another, is a matter of European 
concern and must of course be conceded; that Bel- 
gium must be evacuated and restored, no matter what 
sacrifices and concessions that may involve ; and that 
national aspirations must be satisfied, even within his 
own Empire, in the common interest of Europe and 
mankind. If he is silent about questions which touch 
the interest and purpose of his allies more nearly 
than they touch those of Austria only, it must of 
course be because he feels constrained, I suppose, to 
defer to Germany and Turkey in the circumstances. 
Seeing and conceding, as he does, the essential prin- 
ciples involved and the necessity of candidly applying 
them, he naturally feels that Austria can respond to 
the purpose of peace as expressed by the United 
States with less embarrassment than could Germany. 
He would probably have gone much farther had it 
not been for the embarrassments of Austria's alliances 
and of her dependence upon Germany. 

After all, the test of whether it is possible for either 
government to go any further in this comparison of 
views is simple and obvious. The principles to be 
applied are these: 

First, that each part of the final settlement must 
be based upon the essential justice of that particular 
case and upon such adjustments as are most likely to 
bring a peace that will be permanent; 

Second, that people and provinces are not to be 
bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if 
they were mere chattels and pawns in a game, even 
the great game, now forever discredited, of the bal- 
ance of power ; but that 

Third, every territorial settlement involved in this 
war must be made in the interest and for the benefit 
of the populations concerned, and not as a part of any 
mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst 
rival states ; and 

Fourth, that all well defined national aspirations 
shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be 
accorded them without introducing new or perpetuat- 
ing old elements of discord and antagonism that would 
be likely in time to break the peace of Europe and 
consequently of the world. 

A general peace erected upon such foundations can 
be discussed. Until such a peace can be secured we 
have no choice but to go on. So far as we can judge, 
these principles that we regard as fundamental are 
already everywhere accepted as imperative except 
among the spokesmen of the military and annexation- 
ist party in Germany. If they have anywhere else 
been rejected, the objectors have not been sufficiently 
numerous or influential to make their voices audible. 



PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 



19 



The tragical circumstance is that this one party in 
Germany is apparently willing and able to send mil- 
lions of men to their death to prevent what all the 
world now sees to be just. 

I would not be a true spokesman of the people of 
the United States if I did not say once more that we 
entered this war upon no small occasion, and that we 
can never turn back from a course chosen upon princi- 
ple. Our resources are in part mobilized now, and 
we shall not pause until they are mobilized in their 
entirety. Our armies are rapidly going to the fight- 
ing front, and will go more and more rapidly. Our 
whole strength will be put into this war of emancipa- 
tion — emancipation from the threat and attempted 
mastery of selfish groups of autocratic rulers — what- 
ever the difficulties and present partial delays. We 
are indomitable in our power of independent action 
and can in no circumstances consent to live in a world 
governed by intrigue and force. We believe that our 
own desire for a new international order under which 
reason and justice and the common interests of man- 
kind shall prevail is the desire of enlightened men 
everywhere. Without that new order the world 
will be without peace and human life will lack tolera- 
ble conditions of existence and development. Having 
set our hand to the task of achieving it, we shall not 
turn back. 

I hope that it is not necessary for me to add that 
no word of what I have said is intended as a threat. 
That is not the temper of our people. I have spoken 
thus only that the whole world may know the true 
spirit of America — that men everywhere may know 
that our passion for justice and for self-government 
is no mere passion of words, but a passion which, once 
set in action, must be satisfied. The power of the 
United States is a menace to no nation or people. 
It will never be used in aggression or for the aggrand- 
izement of any selfish interest of our own. It springs 
cut of freedom and is for the service of freedom. 

Address Delivered at Baltimore on the Opening 

of the Third Liberty Loan Campaign 

April 6, 1918. 

F elloxv-Ctthens : 

This is the anniversary of our acceptance of Ger- 
many's challenge to fight for our right to live and be 
free, and for the sacred rights of free men every- 
where. The nation is awake. There is no need to 
call to it. We know what the war must cost, our ut- 
most sacrifice, the lives of our fittest men, and, if need 
be, all that we possess. 

The loan we are met to discuss is one of the least 
parts of what we are called upon to give and to do, 
though in itself imperative. The people of the whole 
country are alive to the necessity of it, and are ready 
to lend to the utmost, even where it involves a sharp 
skimping and daily sacrifice to lend out of meagre 
earnings. They will look with reprobation and con- 
tempt upon those who can and will not, upon those 
who demand a higher rate of interest, upon those who 
think of it as a mere commercial transaction. 



I have not come, therefore, to urge the loan. I 
have come only to give you, if I can, a more vivid con- 
ception of what it is for. 

The reasons for this great war, the reason why it 
had to come, the need to fight it through, and the is- 
sues that hang upon its outcome are more clearly dis- 
closed now than ever before. It is easy to see just 
what this particular loan means because the cause we 
are fighting for stands more sharply revealed than at 
any previous crisis of the momentous struggle. The 
man who knows least can now see plainly how the 
cause of justice stands and what the imperishable 
thing is he is asked to invest in. Men in America 
may be more sure than they ever were before that the 
cause is their own, and that if it should be lost, their 
own great nation's place and mission in the world 
would be lost with it. 

I call you to witness, my fellow countrymen, that 
at no stage of this terrible business have I judged the 
purpose of Germany intemperately. I should be 
ashamed in the presence of affairs so grave, so fraught 
with the destinies of mankind throughout all the 
world, to speak with truculence, to use the weak lan- 
guage of hatred or vindicative purpose. 

We must judge as we would be judged. I have 
sought to learn the objects Germany has in this war 
from the mouths of her own spokesmen and to deal as 
frankly with them as I wished them to deal with me. 
I have laid bare our own ideals, our own purposes, 
without reserve or doubtful phrase, and have asked 
them to say as plainly what it is that they seek. 

Wc have ourselves proposed no injustice, no ag- 
gression. We are ready, whenever the final reckon- 
ing is made, to be just to the German people, deal 
fairly with the German power as with others. There 
can be no difference between peoples in the final judg- 
ment if it is indeed to be a righteous judgment. To 
propose anything but justice, even-handed and dispas- 
sionate justice, to Germany at any time, whatever the 
outcome of the war, would be to renounce and dishonor 
our own cause. For we ask nothing that we are not 
willing to accord. 

It has been with this thought that I have sought 
to learn from those who spoke for Germany whether 
it was justice or dominion and the execution of their 
own will upon the other nations of the world that the 
German leaders were seeking. They have answered, 
answered in unmistakable terms. They have avowed 
that it was not justice, but dominion, and the unhin- 
dered execution of their own will. 

The avowal has not come from Germany's states- 
men. It has come from her military leaders, who are 
her real rulers. Her statesmen have said that they 
wished peace, and were ready to discuss its terms 
whenever their opponents were willing to sit down at 
the conference table with them. Her present chan- 
cellor has said — in indefinite and uncertain terms, in- 
deed, and in phrases that often seem to deny their 
own meaning, but with as much plainness as he 
thought prudent — that he believed that peace should 
be based upon the principles which we should declare 
will be our own in the final settlement. 



20 



WAR REPRINTS, NO. 6. 



At Brest-Litovsk her civilian delegates spoke in 
similar tones, professed their desire to conclude a fair 
peace and accord to the peoples with whose fortunes 
they were dealing the right to choose their own alle- 
giance. 

But action accompanied and followed the profes- 
sion. 

Their military masters, the men who act for Ger- 
many and exhibit her purpose in execution, pro- 
claimed a very different conclusion. We cannot mis- 
take what they have done — in Russia, in Finland, in 
the Ukraine, in Rumania. The real test of their jus- 
tice and fair play has come. From this we may judge 
the rest. 

They are enjoying in Russia a cheap triumph in 
which no brave or gallant nation can long take pride. 
A great people, helpless by their own act, lies for the 
time at their mercy. Their fair professions are for- 
gotten. They do not here set up justice, but every- 
where impose their power and exploit everything for 
their own use and aggrandizement; and the peoples 
of conquered provinces are invited to be freed under 
their dominion. 

Are we not justified in believing that they would do 
the same things at their western front, if they were 
not there face to face with armies whom even their 
countless divisions cannot overcome? If, when they 
have felt their check to be final, they should propose 
favorable and equitable terms to Belgium and France 
and Italy, could they blame us if we concluded that 
they did so only to assure themselves of a free hand 
in Russia and the east? 

Their purpose is undoubtedly to make all the Slavic 
peoples, all the free and ambitious nations of the Bal- 
tic peninsula, all the lands that Turkey has domi- 
nated and misruled, subject to their will and ambi- 
tion, and build upon that dominion an empire of force, 
upon which they fancy that they can then erect an 
empire of gain and commercial supremacy; an empire 
as hostile to the Americas as to the Europe which it 
will overawe; an empire which will ultimately master 
Persia, India and the peoples of the far east. 

In such a program our ideals, the ideals of justice 
and humanity and liberty, the principle of the free 
self-determination of nations upon which all the mod- 
ern world insists, can play no part. They are re- 
jected for the ideals of power, for the principle that 
the strong must rule the weak, that trade must follow 
the flag, whether those to whom it is taken welcome 
it or not ; that the peoples of the world are to be made 
subject to the patronage and overlordship of those 
who have the power to enforce it. 



That program once carried out, America and all 
who care or dare to stand with her must arm and 
prepare themselves to contest the mastery of the 
world, a mastery in which the rights of common men, 
the rights of women and of all who are weak, must for 
the time being be trodden under foot and disregarded, 
and the old age-long struggle for freedom and right 
begin again at its beginning. 

Everything that America has lived for and loved 
and grown great to vindicate and bring to a glorious 
realization will have fallen in utter ruin and the gates 
of mercy once more pitilessly shut upon mankind. 

The thing is preposterous and impossible ; and yet 
is not that the whole course and action the German 
armies have meant wherever they have moved? I do 
not wish, even in this moment of utter disillusion- 
ment, to judge harshly or unrighteously. I judge 
only what the German arms have accomplished with 
unpitying thoroughness throughout every fair region 
they have touched. 

What, then, are we to do? For myself, I am ready, 
ready still, ready even now, to discuss a fair and just 
and honest peace at any time that is sincerely pur- 
posed ; a peace in which the strong and the weak shall 
fare alike. But the answer, when I proposed such a 
peace, came from the German commanders in Russia, 
and I cannot mistake the meaning of the answer. 

I accept the challenge. I know that you will ac- 
cept it. All the world shall know that you accept it. 
It shall appear in the utter sacrifice and self-forget- 
fulness with which we shall give all that we love and 
all that we have to redeem the world and make it fit 
for free men like ourselves to live in. 

This now is the meaning of all that we do. Let 
everything we say, my fellow-countrymen, every- 
thing that we henceforth plan and accomplish, ring 
true to this response till the majesty and might of 
our power shall fill the thought, and utterly defeat the 
force of those who flout and misprize what we honor 
and hold dear. 

Germany has once more said that force, and force 
alone, shall decide whether justice and peace shall 
reign in the affairs of men; whether right, as America 
conceives it, or dominion, as she conceives it, shall 
determine the destinies of mankind. 

There is, therefore, but one response possible from 
us : Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or 
limit; the righteous and triumphant force which shall 
make right the law of the world, and cast every selfish 
dominion down in the dust. 



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